Monday, June 27, 2016

Unknown to most of us, 2.6-billion people around the world
have poor eyesight and lack the means to treat and / or improve their current
disorder. According to a recent global economic competitiveness study, poor
vision costs the global economy up to 3-trillion US dollars a year.
Fortunately, there are already ways recently started to alleviate this “largely
unseen” global problem.

The Clearly Vision Prize is an ideas competition for supply
chain experts, data wizards and techies who have knowledge and technologies
that can be applied to vision in innovative new ways. The very best ideas –
those that have the potential to transform the way we deliver vision to all –
will compete for US$250,000 in prizes and one-on-one mentoring opportunities to
make them a reality. Clearly Vision Prize is now open to entrepreneurs around
the world. You don’t need to be working in the eye care industry to enter, but
your idea should aim to drive progress in one or more of these solution
categories:

1. Diagnosis
– People need reliable diagnoses, no matter where they live, their access to
healthcare, or their age or gender.

2.Training
– We need technology to accelerate the process of training people to identify
the conditions that lead to poor vision.

4.Insights
– We need solutions that harness the power of “big data”, helping eye care
provides gain insights to work more efficiently.

One idea to improve access to clear vision to the world’s
poorest citizens that got noticed by the mainstream press was from a Hong Kong
businessman and Clearly Vision Prize founder James Chen. Given that billions
still have no access to vision correcting spectacles, Chen’s suggested a method
of distributing spectacles to those living in the world’s remotest places via
delivery drones like the types already trialed by the online shopping site Amazon
to deliver their orders. The closing date for entries to the Clearly Vision
Prize is on July 18, 2016.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Even though this W.H.O. based agency has classified coffee
as a possible carcinogen since 1991, does its recent “change of mind” spell
good news for coffee drinkers around the world?

By: Ringo Bones

Since 1991, the International Agency for Research on Cancer or
IARC has classified coffee as a Group 2B carcinogen citing that it could
significantly increase one’s risk of getting bladder cancer. But during a
recent press release back in Wednesday, June 15, 2016, the IARC announced after
a result of their ongoing research that there is no conclusive evidence that
drinking coffee causes cancer. Sadly, the IARC also announced the recent
results of their ongoing research that very hot drinks – anything above 85
degrees Celsius – are probably carcinogenic and these include coffee, tea, hot
cocoa, etc.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer or IARC is
an intergovernmental agency forming part of the World Health Organization of
the United Nations. It was formed back in May 1965 and is headquartered in
Lyon, France. The IARC categorizes agents, mixtures and exposures into five
categories. Note that the classification is based only on the strength of
evidence for carcinogenicity, not on the relative increase of cancer risk due
to exposure, or on the amount of exposure necessary to cause cancer. For
example, a substance that only very slightly increases the likelihood of cancer
and only after long-term exposure to large doses, but the evidence for that
slight increase is strong, would be placed in Group 1 even though it does not
pose a significant risk in normal use.

→ Group 1:
carcinogenic to humans: There is enough evidence to conclude that it can cause
cancer in humans.

→ Group
2A: probably carcinogenic to humans: There is strong evidence that it can cause
cancer in humans but at present it is not conclusive.

→ Group
2B: possibly carcinogenic to humans: There is some evidence that it can cause
cancer in humans, but at present it is far from conclusive.

→ Group 3:
not classifiable as to carcinogenicity in humans: There is no evidence at
present that it causes cancer in humans.

→ Group 4:
probably not carcinogenic to humans: There is strong evidence that it does not
cause cancer in humans. Only one substance – caprolactam – has been both
assessed for carcinogenicity by the IARC and placed in this category.

Though it is yet to be peer reviewed by other researchers
but extremely positive results in early trials had the medical science
community hailing T-cell therapy as the future of cancer therapy and some even
said that it has put cancer on the run for the first time in the history of
cancer treatment. “This is unprecedented” said one researcher after more than
half of terminally ill blood cancer patients experienced complete remission in
early clinical trials.Scientists are
claiming “extraordinary” success with engineering immune cells to target a
specific type of blood cancer in their first clinical trials.

Among several dozen patients who would typically have only
had months to live, early experimental trials that used the immune system’s
T-cells to target cancers had “extraordinary results”. In one study, 94-percent
of participants with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) saw symptoms vanish
completely. Patients with other blood cancers have response rates greater than
80-percent and more than half experienced complete remission. Speaking at an
annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS), researcher Stanley Riddell said: “This is unprecedented in medicine, to
be honest, to get response rates in this range in these very advanced patients.”

Modified T-cell cancer therapy is a multi-step process that starts
when a sample of the patient’s T-cells (a type of white blood cell involved in
fighting infection) is taken from their blood. In the lab, these cells have
genetically modified sensor cells (antigen receptors) added to them that can
seek out certain cancers. The modified T-cells are then allowed to multiply and
then the genetically modified T-cells are infused back into the patient where
the new antigen receptors allow them to target and destroy the cancer cells.

“There are reasons to be optimistic, there are reasons to be
pessimistic,” said Stanley Riddell of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
in Washington State. He added that the researchers believe that lowering the
dose of the modified T-cells can reduce the risk of side-effects. Modified
T-cell cancer therapy is often considered an option of last resort because
reprogramming the immune system can come with dangerous side-effects, including
cytokine release syndrome (sCRS) – and overload of defense cells.

Friday, January 29, 2016

Even though the “face of Zika virus” presented by the press
has so far been microcephaly afflicted infants from Brazil, but did you know
that the Zika virus was originally from a Ugandan forest?

By: Ringo Bones

At the moment, the “face of Zika virus” or the overall
picture of it presented by the world’s main news providers has been so far
microcephaly afflicted infants from Brazil – mainly from Rio de Janeiro – which
has so far raised fears that this year’s Summer Olympic Games which will be
held this coming August could potentially trigger a pandemic that could help
spread the Zika virus across the world or at least something akin to the
previous Ebola virus epidemic across West Africa during the latter half of
2014. The Zika virus in current affected regions are mainly transmitted by
daytime-active mosquitoes and has been isolated from a number of species in the
genus Aedes, such as Aedes aegypti and various arboreal mosquitoes such as Aedes
africanus. Despite of the current anxiety over the Zika virus, does the general
population know that the virus originally came from a remote jungle in Uganda
and that it was first discovered almost 70 years ago?

In 1947, scientists researching yellow fever placed a rhesus
macaque in a cage in the Zika Forest (zika meaning “overgrown” in the Luganda
language), near the East African Virus Research Institute in Entebbe, Uganda.
The monkey then developed a fever and researchers isolated from its serum a
transmissible agent that was first described as Zika virus in 1952. It was
subsequently isolated from a human in Nigeria in 1954. Thanks to the increased travel due to the 1960s "Jet Age", the Zika virus is now widely distributed in tropical equatorial regions across the world. From its discovery until
2007, confirmed cases of Zika virus infection from Africa and Southeast Asia
were extremely rare, thus explains why no work was ever done in developing a
Zika virus vaccine since the virus’ discovery back in 1947. And health
authorities have announced that an effective vaccine against the Zika virus won’t
be available for at least 10 or even 12 years.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, Brazilian
health authorities reported more than 3,500 microcephaly cases between October
2015 and January 2016. Some of the affected infants have has a severe type of
microcephaly and some have died. The full spectrum of outcomes that might be
associated with infection during pregnancy and the factors that might increase
risk to fetuses are not yet fully understood. More studies are planned to learn
more about the risks of Zika virus infection during pregnancy. In the worst
affected region of Brazil approximately 1 percent of newborns are suspected of
microcephaly. The current Zika virus epidemic in Brazil had caused debilitating
health problems in newborns hitherto unseen since the teratogenic effects of
thalidomide surfaced back in the 1960s.